


Burning Firebrands

by honorarycassowary



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Child Death, Gen, Pregnancy, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Dream, mentions of Gideon Classic & Augustine & Mercymorn, offscreen genocide, offscreen mass murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:55:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26655493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorarycassowary/pseuds/honorarycassowary
Summary: Wake will never see a better future, but she'll make damn sure no necromancer sees one either.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 43





	Burning Firebrands

**Author's Note:**

> Title is an excerpt from [The Burning of Ilium, trans. Anna Stanford.](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32373)

Wake didn’t know what the fuck she had expected. Necromancers had irradiated souls, and the radiation rotted away their seed and their wombs. She hadn’t been under any illusion that Lyctors were _different_.

No, it was the incompetence that galled her. They had chosen wizard tools knowing she was no lich freak, and chosen to use the woman’s eggs knowing birth stats from wizard wombs. Imperial filth stole Edenite children and imprisoned the pregnant, slavering over getting just one more body to throw into the grinder for the vampires to suck up. Now these ugly genocidal ghouls chose to act like they had a right to _morals_ and _discretion_ , as if the point wasn’t to drive a stake through the heart of this fucking war. They should’ve just cut a uterus out of a girl on the next planet they murdered and handed it over to her. It would’ve been cleaner and fresher.

She paced in tight circles around the shuttle, five paces up and three paces across. Her own uterine matrix.

For want of other movement, Wake plunged her arm into the womb vats and pulled away the meat. It came away with a wet tearing sound, like gristle from steak. She threw it to the floor and stomped on it, not that it resembled anything human enough to be satisfying. It wasn’t revenge. It wasn’t even posturing, not without an audience.

She shut her eyes and pressed her hot forehead to the wall of the shuttle, and let space steal away her heat. Who cares if they’d let her fall. She’d drag them down with her. No matter what, she always finished the job.

*

The hardest part of impregnating herself was the logistics. It was a two-person job, even when the man's contribution was in a refrigerated cup.

But that didn't get to matter. Wake had a job to do, a job made infinitely fucking harder by the two incompetents whose faces she'd grind into salt and Herald chitin if she ever saw again. She made it work. She made the pregnancy take, where the lich embryos had shriveled and wasted like their donor's heart.

Wake had put a bullet through that heart once, and the zombie had just kept moving. She hadn't stopped trying to trap Wake in her net until Wake dislocated her jaw and sawed through the temporalis with some dead ghoul-slave's trench knife. That was the lesson she wanted to teach each and every one of those walking corpses: it didn't matter if they could get back up. She got back up too.

*

The parasite was called _Bomb_. Proper Edenite names were three parts – value, goal, and action. So it was _Fuck Wizards Kill Them All Bomb_ , in her more whimsical moments of dehydration.

She trained every day she could stand to. She trained through the emesis and the swollen feet, trained until she thought her back would snap in two. It was bad for her body, Wake knew, but it wasn’t like her body was getting out of this. If the liches had spoken truthfully – and they _better fucking have_ – the thing in the tomb would tear her throat out as soon as she finished slitting the infant's throat. Some thanks for breaking its bonds, not that Wake had ever given a shit about gratitude.

At least by all accounts it wasn’t a necromancer. She couldn’t have stood dying to a wizard. But she could stand dying, and she’d die laughing as Gideon watched her ruin every piece of duty he’d ever broken his body for.

The sun would burn up the Houses. The dams on the River would break. And Wake would go gentle and gleeful into that good night.


End file.
